Exploring Contagion in Digital Innovation: A Virus Perspective

Researchers have used contagion metaphors such as diffusion, fashion, and mimicking to examine how digital innovations spread across an organizational field. We extend this line of inquiry by applying Virus Theory to a longitudinal investigation of how three Danish home care organizations adopted mobile technology into their day-to-day operations. Focusing on how innovations (the virus) play out within these three organizations (the hosts) over a 20-year period, we identify three patterns of contagion in digital innovation. In one case, mutation was evident as mobile technology triggered a radical transformation that replaced a control-based with a trust-based regime. In another, incubation was prominent as mobile technology maturated through a slow-paced transformation. In the third case, dormancy was essential as the organization first abandoned mobile technology and then revitalized it at a later stage. As such, the Virus Theory-inspired analysis highlights how the same idea about digital innovations unfolds differently within individual organizations, hence offering new understandings of the ongoing, interrupted, and long-term way in which digital innovations spread across a field. As a result, we argue that the Virus Theory contributes new knowledge about contagion in digital innovation compared to established theories of diffusion, fashion, and mimicking."